The Avengers #1 Post-Game Interview with Jonathan Hickman

With the release of The Avengers #1 today, I think it’s safe to say that Marvel NOW! is officially in full swing. Marvel’s relaunch of their flagship series is a big deal, and leading the charge is none other than Jonathan Hickman, hot off the heels of his acclaimed Fantastic Four run.

In the tradition of our other post-game features, we went behind the scenes of issue #1 with Hickman. There are full spoilers for Avengers #1, so tread carefully if you haven’t read the book yet.

IGN Comics: First and foremost, you’ve recently wrapped a really successful run on the Fantastic Four and now you’re jumping into the Avengers. How has your work on the FF prepared you for tackling Avengers?

Jonathan Hickman: Well, I think they’re really different books. I think more than anything else, me doing what I did on Fantastic Four made it easier for the people at Marvel to kind of get what I want to do with both Avengers books and where I want to go with the franchise. So I think probably that’s the biggest get in relation to Fantastic Four and Avengers.

IGN: So in Fantastic Four, there was a lot of reference to the past history of the FF and reintroducing old ideas and old concepts. But Avengers #1 really doesn’t feel that way. Is it safe to say that your approach will be quite different on Avengers as opposed to Fantastic Four?

Hickman: Yeah, I think that’s completely fair. I think when I came on Fantastic Four, it was a franchise in need of polishing up. I think a lot of people were kind of confused as to what made it work and what didn’t work. How could we make it relevant again? So I did a lot of getting back to what makes it function; of what’s at the heart of the book. So because of that, it felt nostalgic.

But there’s nothing unhealthy about the Avengers franchise. It is arguably the strongest franchise in comics. It’s not just accessible in our publishing industry; I don’t think I’m overstating it to say that it’s a phenomenal success in other places also. The thing that I’m trying to do is to push it to its next logical step and to be very aggressive. To try something new; to see what’s next. That kind of thing. I think that they’re really, really different approaches because the franchises were in really, really different places.

IGN: In Avengers #1,it’s established right on the title page that the core cast in this book are very movie-friendly. Was this a conscious decision on your part or was this something Marvel requested?

Hickman: I think that’s where we start, right? And that kind of goes back to the point of what we’re going for, is that we kind of start where everyone is familiar now. We expand forward. That wasn’t a Marvel mandate or anything like that. Don’t get me wrong – if I wouldn’t have done that, if I made it a book about Black Knight and Yellowjacket and a commentary about previous Avengers runs, then maybe I would’ve gotten that note! [laughs] But I was never going to get that note.

IGN: Right in the beginning of this issue, we get to see glimpses of events that have not yet come to pass. You’re sort of known for your meticulous plotting, so how far ahead are we looking in this two-page sequence?

Hickman: Two years, I think? A year and a half, or something like that. And then when we get to the end of those events, the book spins off in a completely different direction. But yeah, I think that’s about a year and a half to two years down the road.

IGN: Awesome. And the villain you introduced here, Ex Nihilo -- which means “out of nothing” in Latin -- seems like a very deliberate name for this new character. Can you talk a little bit about how the name pertains to the character and how it informs his plans on Mars?

Hickman: All of the characters that make up the Garden are like avatars for creation in various mythologies. That’s why one is Aleph, one is Abyss, one is Ex Nihilo… it’s what everything was made out of. That’s kind of what that all is. So yeah, obviously deliberate and appropriate for dudes that want to remake the Earth, Avengers be damned.

IGN: So why was it important to you to create a new threat here for issue #1 instead of using one of the many established villains of the Avengers?

Hickman: Because this is something new. This is what’s next. This is stepping off into a new direction. I’m following an incredibly successful, incredibly talented guy in Brian Michael Bendis, and being familiar, obviously, with a bunch of his run because it happened while I’ve been in comics, if you look at what he did from Disassembled onward, he went back and mined pretty much all the good Avengers stuff of the past.

Which is what he needed to do; he was rebooting the franchise and helping to turn it into this huge, massive thing that it has become. So it doesn’t really make sense to go back to that and do that again. I mean, we’ll visit some of that stuff down the road, but to start off that way, I didn’t think that would be a smart way to go.

IGN: Something I’ve always been curious about, particularly as it pertains to this cast, is you’ve got characters like Thor and Hulk fighting the bad guys on Mars alongside characters like Hawkeye and Black Widow. Is it a difficulty in terms of plotting to have those characters stand side-by-side with characters of such a massive power level?

Hickman: That’s always the interesting thing about group dynamics. Captain America clearly is not the most powerful member of the Avengers, and he hasn’t been in the vast number of iterations he’s shown up in. That’s just interesting character stuff. What makes this character valuable, even if they can’t bench press a planet? Lots of things! That’s kind of the fun of writing a team book.

IGN: Something else I really enjoyed about this issue is that it’s almost like it’s starting the story in a place that feels like the climax of the typical superhero story. The good guys are down, evil seems to have triumphed. Judging by that, how big would you say the scope of this series is?

Hickman: We’re going to make it as big as we possibly can. What comes after something being the biggest franchise in comics? I don’t know, but we’ll see and hopefully and it will go well! It’s all theoretical projections at this point, man.

IGN: The last page of the book – you’ve made it no secret that the cast for your Avengers run will be pretty gigantic. What goes into picking and choosing the characters you’d like to use? Are characters dictated by story or vice versa?

Hickman: Some of them are characters that we feel are prominent in the Marvel Universe right now. Some of them are characters I just wanted to write. The vast majority of them are very story-specific and have a specific role to play as we go forward. I’m not quite sure how to answer that beyond broadly, but we put a lot of thought into it across the board.

IGN: And my last question is just, what’s the relationship going to be between Avengers and New Avengers? Will it be similar to what we saw in the past, or even what we saw with Fantastic Four and FF?

Hickman: It’ll be different than that. Beyond a very small few, no one in Avengers knows what’s going on in New Avengers. But the guys in New Avengers know what’s going on in Avengers. The dynamic will be very, very different.